Apple opens a dedicated concert venue with spatial audio and multi-cam video recording
Located at Apple's London HQ, the 600-seat venue is designed to capture live gigs.
Apple just opened a new live venue at its UK Battersea Power Station headquarters in London that seems tailor-made for Apple Music Live concerts and recordings. Apple Music Hall is designed as an "intimate concert hall" with space for up to 600 people in standing and seating configurations, the company said. As you'd expect, it's also one of the most state-of-the-art in the world with 48 speakers, 16 camera locations and a Spatial Audio live-recording facility.
"Today, with the opening of Apple Music Hall, we are once again taking an unprecedented step further in our commitment to artists and fans by supporting live music in ways only Apple can do," said Apple's VP of Apple Music and International Content, Oliver Schusser.
The new venue's interior design takes cues from the Battersea Power Station with "heritage brickwork, fluted arches and bronze balconies" along with a glass wall, Apple noted. The main and balcony seating is designed to provide audience intimacy, while the 38-foot-wide stage can be reconfigured for traditional front-facing sets or in-the-round experiences.
The venue is also designed for audiences that can't make it to the live shows. With a 48-speaker Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos sound system and 16 camera mounting locations along with a full live streaming facility, it can beam high-quality live music and video around the world. It's equipped with two dedicated recording and mix studios so that performances can be captured in multitrack recordings mixed in Spatial Audio, "live or after the fact," Apple said. For video, there's a purpose-built broadcast control room with "infrastructure to support iPhone video capture" and presumably other, higher-quality cameras.
It's liable to be popular with musicians thanks to the high-end dressing rooms for bands and crews offering views over Battersea Power Station's shopping and dining facilities. Apple will certainly be the primary beneficiary of the new venue, though up-and-coming artists will too.
"It's important for us to help and provide smaller artists with a smaller space, that has state-of-the-art technology and is really plug-and-play," Schusser told Wallpaper. "You can come in, do an interview..., get your photography and social media done, play a show, broadcast worldwide, and get a high-quality Spatial Audio recording out of it. That's a phenomenal setup for artists to do great work."